When Trolling Becomes Life Becomes Proscription Lists

All of my depersonalizing, demonizing ‘tactics’ have proved to have done far more harm to myself than to any of my intended ‘victims.’

In a way, I can thank my fibromyalgia flare for this. My significantly weakened state has made me feel, very physically, very immediately, the consequences of self-created stress.

It has really forced me, at a primal level, to work hard to modify my interactions. But even at that, it is NOT smooth sailing, and a lot of those dark, toxic feelings still swell when I read certain words.

I conditioned my mind over a period of maybe 5 or so years to create antihumans, subhumans, demons, and I kept upping the ante, in much the same way that yellers have to keep yelling louder to get the same results.

Even after I intellectually saw the limitations of my ‘tactics,’ even after I came to understand that tactics had given way to fulfilling the beast inside it has STILL been a hard struggle to reconfigure my mind for a different type of interaction.

I believe that a LOT of people are going down that same path. The constant battles on the social medias, the ease with which we can rage bloody murder at one another with little fear of lasting repercussions (the physical proximity problems, the “not interacting with these people on a regular basis in your life” factor), the need to constantly one-up the screaming, to one-up the claims to moral supremacy, the need to constantly one-up the claims of the other side being subhuman and retarded is creating patterns of thinking that, at one point (I believe) emerged from ideas, assumptions, beliefs, but now are becoming the reflexive, non-analytical, emotional candy distributor that DRIVES ideas, assumptions, and beliefs.

Now, the proscription lists, the people assigned for metaphorical death, the undesirable, the unredeemables, the evil ones, grows on all sides as more and more people put more and more people in categories that allow them to potentially stab the other in the throat in the name of conquering evil and serving justice to the evildoers.

What might set off violence in larger scales throughout this land might not so much be the change that is taking place, but the reaction TO that change.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv